Conventional vending machines for pastries, candy bars, soda cans and other snack products must be able to hold a substantial inventory of goods so that they do not need to be serviced too often. Accordingly, they tend to be bulky and heavy and occupy about a square meter (10 square feet) of floor space, with a height of almost 2 meters (72 inches).
The reloading of such a machine is time consuming since items must be inserted one by one, and inventory of unsold items must be checked for expiration date, and, occasionally, replaced. Cash must then be collected and counted by the servicing employee. The good-holding stations must be cleaned of all oil and grease that may have oozed out of the packaged goods. These cumbersome procedures are time-consuming, labor intensive, and sometimes give occasion for pilferage and theft.
Conventional machines are not well-adapted to small job sites having 150 employees or less, because the profit generated at such a small site can not justify the labor cost of servicing the machines.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,236,649 Fellner et al. offers a partial solution to the above-mentioned problems by the use of a removable and replaceable magazine for the goods which can be loaded in the factory then used to replace an empty magazine or partially empty one. However, this type of magazine is relatively inefficient since it can hold only one item of goods in each location. Moreover, the coins need still be collected and counted on site. The same type of shortcomings characterize the vending machine disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. RE. 32,115 Lockwood et al. which uses a drum carousel to hold the goods to be sold. Although an empty carousel could be removed and replaced by a fully loaded one, each carousel station can only hold one item, and the cash must be handled separately. The inefficient designs of the above-devices inevitably leads to bulky vending machines which are not suitable for small locations.
The instant invention results from an attempt to palliate these various shortcomings.